What I always wanted – a Russian bride?

I’ve been getting an awful lot of phishing emails lately, but this one really tickled my funny bone

I used to imagine that some sweatshop hacker sat hunched over a keyboard somewhere, grinning maniacally as he/she sent out another virus laden email. But I suspect the reality is more like :

1. Unsuspecting Netizen enters his/her email address somewhere,

2. Said email address is tacked onto some database of addresses,

3. Said database is sold to malware distributors who then activate a program that sends out a hook email to every address in the database,

4. Neither the program nor the malware distributor care whether the hook is going to be ‘plausible’ to most addressees – e.g. why would I have signed up to digitally date women? [No offence to gay ladies!]

5. The rationale of these mass mailings is that out of all those millions, one or two will bite. They are the real targets. They will click on the link, their pc’s will become infected and the cycle of digital infection continues.

Anyway, that was not the post I meant to write, but who can resist a Russian bride?

cheers

Meeks

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About acflory

I am the kind of person who always has to know why things are the way they are so my interests range from genetics and biology to politics and what makes people tick.
For fun I play online mmorpgs, read, listen to a music, dance when I get the chance and landscape my rather large block.
Work is writing. When a story I am working on is going well I'm on cloud nine. On bad days I go out and dig big holes...
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29 responses to “What I always wanted – a Russian bride?”

Email scams and phishing seem to be the undesirable by-product of the online world… much like plastic packaging of the modern world in the oceans… escalating but not much we can do about it except shout awareness. I don’t even find the ridiculousness of it entertaining any more. It’s just bloody tedious and gets in the way of the majority of us who inhabit the online world for for benign purposes. That’s the small phishy fish, and then there’s the Big Data fish responsible for flooding sites and in-boxes with “legitimate” advertising…

LMAO – what a great name for a blog! If I had the technical expertise I’d love to catalogue all the various examples and varieties of phishing, and put them in one place for people to check out. Maybe some enterprising person will do just that one day. 😀

My mum got an sms from a UK based emailer, claiming to be from apple; informing her that she won a million pounds in apple products and that all she had to do to claim that, is to send an email to uk-apple@eng******** (not gonna write the whole thing…) So what do you do? well the obvious thing of course. You register that scammer’s email to as many mailing lists you can, including those that sell pills enlarge parts of the body, and those that sell clothing that doesn’t pass as clothing and is not intended for everyday use. Flood their inbox 😛

Oh yes, i trained her to save those messages and show them to me later. The easy way to pick them out is that big companies like apple, microsoft or whoever, will always use @apple, @microsoft, @amazon etc. They have no need to use @gmail or anything else.

Good point that. Unfortunately some of the more sophisticated ones create domain names that sort of copy cat genuine company names. I can’t think of any real ones off hand but something like @amazons.com. Close but not quite the real deal.

Btw I’m really enjoying your contributions to the story. Not bad for a techie geek. 😀

I’m heartbroken now, you’ve dashed my hopes. All these months I’ve been getting the messages of love from abroad and now you say they’re not specifically for me. That I’m just one of thousands who receive these. How will I ever recover from this? Unloved and unwanted.
xxx Huge Hugs xxx